This past weekend’s inauguration didn’t feel real. It still doesn’t.
Despite the evidence, it’s hard for me to accept that the presidency of Donald Trump is really happening. Watching the news feels like we’ve been granted a collective glimpse into an alternate timeline, a bad future, as a warning and a means of averting it. But this is no dream or fantasy, it’s the reality we live in now and we’ll be facing it for years to come.
It feels all the more unreal because it’s such a sharp break with what came before. In every conceivable way, Trump is the polar opposite of his predecessor. Whatever you think of his deeds in office, Barack Obama was a man of uncommon integrity and decency: cool under pressure, fair-minded to a fault, eloquent in oratory, optimistic in outlook. For all that his rise to the presidency was historic, he wore that burden lightly and never treated himself as the pivot around which history turns. Having had a glimpse of all that, it seems inconceivable that America could choose this.
Until November, it seemed that the Obama administration was the first step in an ascent toward a better future. Now it seems more like a brief false dawn in a deepening gloom. Rather than continue on the path of greater tolerance and expanding empathy, we’ve chosen to become small, to turn in on ourselves and cling to the prejudices of the past. Rather than building on Obama’s accomplishments, the incoming administration and Congress will tear them down, and we’ll be fighting over the scraps for years to come.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t angry, but it’s hard to decide just who I’m angry at. Certainly, the lion’s share of the blame goes to the voters who decided that nothing about Trump was disqualifying: not his open appeal to racism, his aggressive misogyny, his ferocious ignorance, his raging narcissism, his toddler-like lack of impulse control, or his total disinterest in actually doing the job. Some also has to go to the media that chose to normalize a deeply abnormal candidate, permitting his fabulism to go unchallenged in the name of ratings.
As in 2000, some also has to go to the third-party refuseniks who decided that there was no difference between the major-party candidates (if there was ever an election where the fallacy of that couldn’t have been more obvious, it was this one). Some of them went so far as to declare that they’d rather see the worse choice elected to inflict salutary suffering on the electorate.
But more than anything else, I’m profoundly upset and disappointed in the Democratic voters who loved Obama, who benefited from his policies, but didn’t turn out to support his coalition when his name was no longer on the ballot. The apathy of good people was a problem that dogged his entire presidency, contributing to his losses in the midterms, culminating in the paradox that the electorate spurned his appeal on behalf of a candidate who would have carried on his policies, even as he personally remained well-liked and popular.
And yes, I’m aware that Hillary Clinton trounced Trump in the popular vote. Unfortunately, that result didn’t hold true in the states where it mattered. Nor does it matter that he enters office with a historically low approval rating. The Republicans have become expert at exploiting the undemocratic quirks of the American system for their own benefit (and creating a few more of their own, where they can). In a way, it’s a hostage situation – a numerical minority can hold the reins of power for election after election and impose their will on the rest of us, or make the country ungovernable if they can’t.
Again, it’s hard to believe we could have been so foolish as to plunge ourselves into this disaster. All the safeguards built into the American system by the founders were put there to keep out a demagogue like this. But over the past few decades, we’ve systematically eroded or undermined all of them, and this is the result. We’ve weathered constitutional crises before, but it can’t be ruled out that we’re facing the end of the American experiment as we know it. Everything in Trump’s persona suggests that he intends to govern in the manner of a banana republic dictator, and we have a compliant Congress that’s poised to let him. It’s a hard truth to accept, but there’s no virtue in pretending reality is anything other than it is.
Original image: HARRIS.news via Wikimedia Commons, released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license
